Professor of Visual Studies
Colleges of Letters and Science | Departments of Art History and Gender and Women's Studies
Hometown: Born in Albany, New York; grew up in Dallas, Texas
An artist-theorist and historian, Jill H. Casid holds the position of Professor of Visual Studies with a cross-appointment in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Casid pursues a research practice across writing, photography, and film that is dedicated to queer, crip, trans*feminist, and decolonial interventions. Casid exhibits their artwork nationally and internationally, including in recent exhibitions at Signs and Symbols and the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York and Documenta fifteen. Casid’s current projects concern the question of doing things with being undone in the Necrocene and what aesthetics can do in confronting the political problem of form in the situation of crisis ordinary.
Dr. Casid uses she or they pronouns.
Talks:
Doing Things with Being Undone in the Necrocene
This talk discusses my current book project that confronts climate crisis as a problem that calls for creative practices of care—even for what defies saving or cure. I proceed on the premise that how we treat the dead and dying shows us how we care for life. And I develop a pedagogy in how to live our dying on a dying planet to contest and even transform the terms of that dying by turning our attention to experimentation with decay in the ars moriendi (art of dying) of our time that teaches us how to work with what decomposes us.
Melancholy as Medium
As we confront the worldlessness of a planet on fire, what to do with the ways we are being undone? In their current films, Casid takes back melancholy, that pathologized other side of grief and mourning as an urgent praxis for negotiating our abandonment in what they term the Necrocene. Casid elaborates melancholy’s potential as a queer, crip and trans* medium for living our dying on a dying planet in ways that contest the situation of killing disposability in which the global heteropatriarchal racial capitalism that makes a viral mutation such as Covid-19 lethal also fuels anti-Black, anti-trans, and imperialist violence.